Data Warehouses are Gilded Cages. What Comes Next?

If you squint, the data warehouse-centric analytics stack can look a lot like mainframe-era centralized control: shared distributed compute, some sandbox space if you are lucky, and no way to work locally that's equivalent. And it's been getting expensive! Yet the major vendors appear to be converging on features. Is this "The End of History" for OLAP? Your laptop is incredibly powerful and tragically underutilized. It has better I/O than servers from just a few years back, and with a solid analytic engine like DuckDB, it can handle surprising workloads. In this talk Nick will share what makes DuckDB fast and show how far single node scale-up can take you. He will also show some ideas Motherduck is testing that blur the line between local and remote systems and shift some of that centralized control back to users.